Find out if you tweet like Obama or Romney with SwiftKey

October 31, 2012

SwiftKey, the company behind Android’s best-selling keyboard, has unveiled a tool that can reveal whether you communicate more like President Barack Obama or Governor Mitt Romney.

By analyzing 150,000 words from speeches made by the Presidential nominees in the final stretch to Election day, SwiftKey’s Prez-o-meter (http://prezometer.swiftkey.net/) can determine which candidate – linguistically speaking – you have most in common with. It works by looking at the distinctive words and phrases you use on Twitter timeline compared to the candidates themselves. The Prez-o-meter then rates your Twitter feed to show which candidate you sway towards.

Any Twitter feed can be entered into the language model – and it reveals a few surprises:

“We wanted to offer a fun take on the traditional ‘How should I vote?’ quiz by creating a mash up of our sophisticated language tools and social media,” explains Ruth Barnett, Head of Communications for SwiftKey and former political journalist.

“We’re not here to tell you how to vote, but we believe in being informed and being heard – principles we really care about in this company. We combed through the words Obama and Romney have used in their speeches to build personalized language models for each candidate. This is then cross-referenced with your own Twitter feed to work out how close the words and phrases you use are to the next President of the United States.”

SwiftKey has previously used its artificial intelligence technology to analyze the speeches of other popular figures, including The Queen, Shakespeare and Dickens. The creation of the Prez-o-meter came from one of the company’s monthly Innovation Days.
SwiftKey is a virtual keyboard app for Android devices that learns its users’ style of writing when they text, tweet or email to then accurately correct and predict words as they are typed. To download the latest version of SwiftKey 3 just go to http://www.swiftkey.net/get-swiftkey/swiftkey, which also has a free trial available for the first month.

SwiftKey has been awarded some of the highest accolades available for its technology, including a Global Mobile Award for Most Innovative App, a Webbys People’s Voice Award for Experimental & Innovation and Best Startup Business at The Guardian Digital Innovation Awards 2012.

For more information about SwiftKey, please visit http://www.swiftkey.net/

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Notes to Editors

Press ready images including logos, screenshots and head shots and can be downloaded from https://www.dropbox.com/gallery/21479396/1/SwiftKey?h=bac6be

About SwiftKey (www.swiftkey.net )
SwiftKey was founded by Cambridge University graduates Jon Reynolds, CEO and Dr Ben Medlock, CTO in August 2008. With a growing team of over 70 people, the company is based in Southwark, London, UK.
The company’s technology makes typing much easier on touchscreen devices, powering the text entry experience with intelligent natural language technology. This is seen in the flagship SwiftKey Keyboard app on Android, which launched in September 2010. The app understands how words work together to give much more accurate corrections and predictions than other keyboards. It can even predict a user’s next word as they type and also powerfully learns over time to make typing easier and even more accurate. Users can personalize SwiftKey Keyboard using Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, SMS or their blog posts.
To date SwiftKey has received more than 15 million downloads, saving users over 130 billion keystrokes: equivalent to nearly a millennium spent typing.